There can be few more delightful woodlands than those of Felbrigg, and no more romantic approach to a seaside than that of the woodland road which goes, as though tunnelled through the trees, steeply down from Felbrigg’s height to Cromer’s level. In the distance, down there, you see the illimitable sea, Cromer’s great church tower standing up against it, and the houses of the town clustered around—a little group set in a vast expanse of salt water and green fields. This is the most delightful way into Cromer, but we may not take it. Like Moses, permitted merely to look upon the Promised Land, we must only gaze upon that road and retrace our route to Roughton, there to pick up the coach-road, by no means so delightful and prepossessing an entrance to Cromer.

It is, however, only comparatively that this entrance is to be despised. It is true it leads past the railway station and a lengthy line of suburbs, down a long gradient, with houses instead of seascape in front of you; but if, indeed, everything be newly created and baldly uninteresting, at least there in nothing sordidly unprosperous in view, and everything is spick-and-span, even to the road-paving, which in every street in Cromer is composed of asphalte. Almost every one of those smart red-brick villas is of the boarding-house order, and only when the very centre of the town is reached, by the church, do the shops commence.

Cromer, until modern times a small fishing village, but now grown to the proud estate of a fashionable, expensive, and exclusive seaside resort, was once a portion of the town of Shipden, and lay quite half a mile distant from the sea. “Shipedana” and “Seepedene,” the names by which Shipden is referred to in the “Domesday Book,” remind us that Shipden was not necessarily merely a place of ships, but that the name perhaps came originally from Anglo-Saxon words meaning a sheep pasture. Vague accounts still tell how Shipden was suddenly destroyed by a violent storm and eruption of the sea in the reign of Henry IV., and half a mile out to sea is still visible, at exceptionally low tides, the mass of flint walling called the “Church Rock,” said to be the remains of Shipden church. A Yarmouth excursion steamer was wrecked on it in the summer of 1888.

Cromer was spoken of in 1374, and again in 1382, as “Crowmere.” Although it thus, by the disappearance of Shipden, was thrust into the foremost place, it never attained the size of that unfortunate town. The sea was advancing too surely for a repetition of Shipden’s fate to be dared. In 1551, if we may judge from the petition then presented to the Privy Council, Cromer was in sore case:—

“It is situate and adjoining so near the sees that of late in our memorye, by the rages and surges of the same sees, the number of a grete sort of houses knowen by us have been swallowed uppe and drownded. The inhabitants hathe to their grete and importunate charges defended the same by making of grete peers, and dayle put to insatiable charges scharse and onetheable to be borne of the same inhabitants.”

This anxiety seems to have made havoc with their literary composition. A direct result of this petition was the grant, thirty years later, of a licence to levy dues upon wheat, barley, and malt, the revenue from them to be applied in defending the town from the sea; but when Taylor, the “Water Poet,” visited Cromer on his “Very Merry—Wherry—Ferry Voyage” round the coast in 1623, the sea was still encroaching, and he describes the place in doleful strain:—

Very true; but the encroaching ocean has not made such great headway since then as might have been expected from past history, and from the soft nature of the cliffs on whose crest the town stands. Those cliffs, 100 feet high, are composed of sand, gravel, and clay, made rotten by landsprings, and only saved from further decay in front of the town by heavy concrete walls.

The church, of whose grandeur Taylor speaks so highly, is the only building in Cromer of any age, and is the town’s one land and sea mark. There is no view of Cromer which does not include its great tower, rising to a height of 159 feet, and the very inevitableness of it is apt at last to change the admiration of a first glimpse into the intolerable boredom created by photographic views from every conceivable and inconceivable point. This great and beautiful building, in the lofty and airy Perpendicular style, built shortly after Shipden was destroyed, owes its present perfect state of repair to the restoration, begun in 1863. Before that work was undertaken, the chancel was a roofless ruin, and had been in that condition ever since 1681, when it was purposely destroyed with gun-powder. The discredit of this act of vandalism, given by popular legend to Cromwell, is an injustice to the Lord Protector. The real vandal was the Rev. Thomas Gill, Rector of Ingworth, lessee of the great tithes under the Bishop of Ely. As lessee, an obligation was laid upon him to keep the chancel in repair, and to save himself expense he obtained permission to destroy it.

The church and its well-kept churchyard, in the very centre of the little town, give the place all the dignity of a cathedral city. Modern commercial buildings, many-storeyed and lofty, are, however, detracting something from the apparent height and great bulk of the church. The old rustic stones in the churchyard still remain, and look strange in the unwonted urban modernity of their surroundings: doubtless some “improving” hand will shortly away with them. Among these simple memorials one may see, prominently displayed, that of five mariners, part of the crew of the Trent, of North Shields, who were drowned on Cromer beach in the great storm of February, 1836; while a memorial to one John Nurse, who left the world without regret, says:—